If you live in the city, right now there's a soccer mom holding the cold metal tailpipe of her minivan to
your head. And she's going to fire it up! What does she want? To start with, she wants your
money--and she wants it now. But not only that, she wants your mental and physical health, your
children's safety, and your grandchildren's future. She needs it all to help support her habit. And the
cops are on her side, and so is the mayor, and so is the governor. One false move, and you're
history, pal.
What do you do now? Surrender? Struggle? Or reason with her?

Maybe it'll take all three

A Place in the Country

The stereotypical American-plan suburb is popularly thought of as being isolated from the city. Both
its
proponents and its detractors often assume this is the case. The hard sell of suburbs is that they are
anti-cities: everything that cities have that is unpleasant, such as crime, noise, traffic, and pollution, the
suburbs do not have, while the qualities that city people miss out on burgeon in brilliant colors, like
overwatered iceplant beds. And so the happy suburbanites stand tall in their back yards, boasting to their
neighbors across the fence how they at last have broken free of downtown. And yet this is a lie: for the
suburbs have only broken free of responsibility. They are, in fact, utterly dependent on their hinterlands
of urban cores, which support them with various forms of subsidy, either in cash or in kind, and which
receive in exchange nothing more than a further degradation of what could have been a vibrant city life.

Maybe the myth of suburban independence began with the first few suburbs, which were placed
around the edge of the city where the farms began. Farms, of course, were physically self-sustaining in
the days before petrochemical agriculture: a farm had its own water and food supply, by definition, and of
course farming areas have a population density that, compared to even a dispersed city, is negligible. And
farms support the city. So suburbanites tend to think of themselves as "rural." But a suburb is not a farm,
a shade tree and a flowerbed feed no one but the snails, and when a farmer goes to work he just steps out
his
front door and is there; the suburbanite drives forty miles into the city. And there's the rub: a rural
economy imposes a small population on the land and engenders relatively little traffic, often consisting of
railroad trains or a small number of trucks, while literally keeping the city alive. The suburban economy
that is replacing it achieves its tranquillity by offsetting its traffic and support services to its urban
hinterlands. It can come into being only by demanding that services (such as sewer and water hookups)
be provided below cost--subsidized partly out of general rather than local revenues--and it can grow only
by demanding expensive road-widening projects, which degrade life in the communities the suburbanites
must drive through in order to work in the city. It is precisely the nature of the
suburb--designed as a residential shell lacking services, which are to be sought elsewhere--that is at the
root of so much environmental degradation in developed countries today. For by placing residences far
from services, and by centralizing services either in urban cores or in Wal-Mart-like or mega-mall
clusters, suburban design requires excessive automobile use, which is accommodated by
building wide,
bleak high-speed roads and freeways. It even increases the cost of food for city dwellers by raising the
assessed valuation of farmland and requiring farmers to move farther from the city. All for the sake of
that backyard barbecue inside that redwood fence.

Every pink stucco house thrown up behind those walls means another several car trips through
someone else's neighborhood every day. And, since not even the direct costs of automobile use are paid
for by fuel taxes and other pertinent fees, every mile that that soccer mom, her husband, and her teenage
kids are driving is being subsidized from general revenues provided by the residents of cities. (See Mark
E. Hanson, "Automobile Subsidies and Land Use," Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 58,
No. 1,1992, pp. 60-71.) In fact, because the residents of inner cities drive the least, the poor are
subsidizing the upper middle class!

What Are We to Do?

What are we to do? The problem seems so big, the developers have been in charge for over fifty
years,
and places such as Los Angeles, which used to have a world-class light rail system in the Pacific Electric
Company, saw their public transit bought up and torn out by a consortium of oil and auto companies,
destroying what could have been a model for urban development. And local governments especially seem
to be in the pockets of the Big Money boys. What is there we can do?

A lot, in fact.

The first thing is Surrender. Whether you live in the suburbs or in the city, you live there and
you have to make the best of it. Each individual action you take that reduces your dependence on the
automobile will make your life and that of your neighbors better.

Work and shop locally whenever possible. Get a bicycle and ride to work and to the store--work
and shopping trips compose the majority of automotive travel in the US, yet most Americans work within
six miles of home. Six miles on a bicycle is a half-hour trip for a regular but non-athletic rider. If you're
afraid to ride on the streets, get a copy of John Forester's Effective Cycling at a library or
bookstore and
learn how urban bicycle commuting is done. (It is, in fact, safer than riding neighborhood streets or
country roads, or bikepaths.) Get some good bike luggage, learn basic maintenance, study how to carry
loads and deal with weather. You can do all this in a few weeks with little effort, and you will not only
make your city a better place to live, but you will give yourself back the world that the glass and steel
walls of your rolling coffin previously kept at bay. Make the best of the trips you have to make. I shop for
a family of three on one of my bikes. Two trips a week does it. When you shop at Price Club, you may
save
ten or twenty dollars over fuel for the trip and amortized costs for your car. Is that sawbuck worth
condemning yourself and your neighbors to life in a concrete desolation? Keep it local.

If someplace is less than a mile away, try walking. It's actually less efficient than bicycling--you
burn four times as much food to go the same distance walking--but you will get to know your community
better.

If you can't take the bike, try the bus or train. It's still a motor vehicle, it's still a box, but it
operates at a higher efficiency than a car, and it's shared with your community.

Drive only if you must. Don't let the car become your default mode.

Another thing you can do is Struggle. Don't let your dissatisfactions go
unheard. When a project
is proposed that involves excessive road-building or centralization of either residential or commercial
development, then PROTEST! If they're planning a Wal-Mart or a Dreamworks or a Heritage Pointe
nearby, PROTEST! Write letters to the editor, write to your local elected officials, write to planning
agencies, write to the developers themselves. Use the Internet: almost all the power elite have e-mail now,
and you can often find their addresses on their web pages. When you're writing politicians, always ask for
a reply. If you're patient and even-tempered (unlike me), then call them on the phone with your script in
hand and tell them why you think this shouldn't be done. Organize a neighborhood
association; city governments listen to these. Find out about the New Urbanism and Sustainable Communities
movements
and involve yourself with people who care about life beyond the dollar. If you're a confrontational sort, set
up or look for a direct-action group such as England's Reclaim the Streets! Hook up with
one of a thousand environmental groups. Look through the Envirolink web site for
some names. You're not alone

Conversely, you can use the same techniques to lobby for positive changes. You can agitate for
things as simple as public bike racks in mercantile districts, or as involved as carbon taxes or greenbelts,
or mixed-class developments that house a variety of people near a variety of possible jobs. You can also
bypass government completely and work, for example, with groups that make micro-loans to help
establish businesses in the inner city. There is, unfortunately, much to be done.

And you can also Reason with the enemy. After all, suburbanites don't
like being stuck inside
their cars anymore than city folk do, and they're the most deeply stuck of all. Be an example of a happy
life outside of car culture. Ask them why they do what they do and whether they're really happy doing it.
Gently explain that not only is it worthwhile to reduce your driving, but it's feasible too. You're doing it,
after all; they could be too. If not all the way, then in part. I have neighbors who drive three blocks to
drop their kids off at a play date. They're gripping a steering wheel and watching for traffic while the kids
fidget in their carseat straps, when they all could be strolling underneath the camphor trees and watching
the squirrels play.

Love Thy Neighbor
After all, that soccer mom is like an addict. Instead of growing up next to a crack house, she grew up
between a gas station and a new-car dealership; everyone she knew was a heavy user, and when she
grew
old enough, she tried a hit herself. Now it's taken over her life, and she does whatever she feels she must
to support her habit--even if it means she has to rob you to do it. But it doesn't have to be that way. You
don't really have to reach for a car first thing each morning. Once you become a recovering driver
yourself, you'll be able to help her.